Most Powerful Woman In Contemporary Art Shares Her Secrets Of Conquering Two Decades Of Master Sales

Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Phillips auction house, photographed at their London building, in London, UK. March 6 2018.Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

Phillips auction house

Cheyenne Westphal speaks candidly and steadfastly about the future of Phillips, leaving you without doubt that the auction house will charge past the billion-dollar mark this year, a significant breakthrough that validates an unwavering polestar to contemporary art.

“We have a very clear mission to reach the $1 billion mark, and we want it to happen in 2019,” says the chairwoman of Phillips. “Financial growth is very important to us. We are investing very heavily in talent, space, and expertise. We’re very much chipping away at the duopoly.”

After 25 years at Sotheby’s, where Westphal served as worldwide head of contemporary art, she made the brave leap to Phillips. Her legacy includes logging world records for masterpieces such as Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, $46.3 million, Sigmar Polke’s Jungle, $27.1 million, Piero Manzoni’s Achrome, $20.2 million, and Alberto Burri’s Saccho e Rosso, $13.2 million, as well as presiding over every contemporary sale in Europe since 1999, including the a July 2015 global record-shattering $204.7 million auction.

Working alongside Edward Dolman, former Christie’s International chairman, Westphal has quickly built on the successes both achieved at the world’s two top auction houses.

“In her two years with Phillips, Cheyenne has had a transformative effect on the company,” said Phillips CEO Dolman. “She has been a true partner to me in helping set the direction of the company, and her unrivaled expertise and deep relationships with collectors has resulted in some of our most significant consignments in recent years.”

Driving what Phillips anticipates as a blockbuster year is the Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collectionacross its salerooms in New York, London, and Hong Kong. The couple developed their remarkable collection throughout their lives in Minnesota, Palm Beach, Fla., and New York. Read about more about the sensational collection including masterworks by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, and Joan Miró.

“The Fiterman Collection is a really wonderful achievement that allows us to showcase our capabilities,” said Westphal. “We need that success to build the next success and maintain our momentum. When Ed Dolman took over 2014, we had $400 million in total auction and private sales, and that has increased 129% though the end of 2018.”

Propelled by the £41.9 million ($57.8 million) sale of Pablo Picasso’s La Dormeuse (1932), 2018 sales soared 29% to $916.5 million from $708.8 million in 2017, setting a record for the global auction house focused exclusively on 20th and 21st century art and design.

“Branding is very important to us. Our strategy is very clear, and our branding is very clear,” said Westphal. “When you have touch point with Phillips, you want it to feel like Phillips. When you walk in our galleries, you find a clean, airy look. We put great emphasis on being able to display art in a very contemporary and fresh way to let the art work shine. That resonates with clients. We choose to do very clear catalogs that highlight the work of art rather than drown out the work of art. We have the ability to really research it and give a very clear and detailed history of the works, as we value expertise greatly.”

Art is a lifelong passion for Westphal.

Growing up in the German spa town Baden-Baden near the Black Forest, she traveled with her mother to Florence and Rome, sparking her earliest interest in art. Studying at St. Andrews in Scotland, her passion blossomed with a classical art history appreciation, but the watershed that would catapult her to the zenith of 20th century art came when she began studying at the University of California Berkeley.

A diligent and appreciative scholar, Westphal credits now-Prof. Emerita Anne Wagner at UC Berkeley with the epiphany that motivated her to dedicate her life to contemporary art.

“’Wow, this is amazing!’ is what I felt after her first lecture,” Westphal joyously recalls. “It was one of those ‘Aha! moments.”

At Sotheby’s, Westphal brought to market some remarkable single-owner collections, including Damien Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, which generated $200.7 million in London in September 2008. She’s set 19 auction records, many for art from the ZERO movement, a Düsseldorf-based group founded in the late 1950s by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who described it as “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.”

Since Westphal joined Phillips, the auction house has made a phenomenal comeback, priming it toward $1 billion in annual sales, a critical milestone that will position Phillips as the third rival to be reckoned with in the fine art auction world.

“I worked with Cheyenne when she was at Sotheby’s, and I have always listened to her advice. Unlike a lot of collectors, I tend to focus on a handful of artists and go deep. Cheyenne was always there to offer guidance,” said J. Tomilson Hill, , who along with his wife, Janine, founded the Hill Art Foundation, a free public exhibition and education space that opened February in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. “I believe that Cheyenne is inspirational to other women working in the art world, by showing that if you have expertise and you work hard, good things happen. Cheyenne is a perfect example of how strong relationships based on trust add value to an auction house. I am pleased to see her thriving at Phillips.”

He added: “Phillips has always had a niche in the auction market and is now gaining in stature. I was buying Mark Grotjahn's butterfly paintings at auction at Phillips years ago because they had the foresight and expertise to understand the importance of these paintings.”

“It’s not easy to crack a 200-year duopoly, because they are quite good at what they do. But it was an opportunity to come to the company as chairwoman and have a very clear strategy that focuses on 20th century art so that Philips can be a disruptive force in the marketplace,” said Westphal. “We’ve taken some massive steps in that direction, and we’re only just getting started. We have very clear ambitions and a lot of knowledge behind it. It’s interesting, and it’s extremely different (from Sotheby’s).”